Tuesday 3 March 2020

# Feast # Saints

Saint Katharine Drexel


The 3rd of March is the feast day of Saint Katharine Drexel. She is the patron saint of philanthropy, and racial justice. She is the second canonised saint to have been born in the United State, and the first that was a U.S. citizen from birth.

Saint Katharine Drexel lived between 1858 and 1955 and was a wealthy heiress of a family in Philadelphia. She felt a calling to help serve the underprivileged, most notably the African American and Native American communities, from a very young age. Her parents often opened their home to the poor which helped her to learn about virtue and charity. She donated money but realised that this was not the lasting change that the communities needed. She requested that a religious order be sent to help manage the institutions she was funding during an audience with Pope Leo XIII. He suggested she became a religious herself to do this. She founded the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament for Indians and Coloured People. She invested $20 million of her personal fortune to help this cause. She build the first missions school for Native Americans in Sante Fe, as well as Xavier University in New Orleans. By the time she died, she had more than 500 sisters of her order teaching in over 60 schools she had founded throughout the U.S. Pope Saint John Paul II canonised her in 2000.

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